A Presbyterian minister interprets the ancient scriptures for a new day

Saturday, May 25, 2013

Who Do You Think You Are?

Psalm
8

Trinity
Sunday

May
26, 2013

Willliam G. Carter

O LORD, our
Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

You have set your glory above the heavens.

Out of the mouths
of babes and infants you have founded a bulwark because of your foes,

to silence the enemy and the avenger.

When I look at your
heavens, the work of your fingers,

the moon and the stars that you have
established;

what are human
beings that you are mindful of them, mortals that you care for them?

Yet you have made
them a little lower than God, and
crowned them with glory and honor.

You have given them
dominion over the works of your hands;

you have put all things under their feet,

all sheep and oxen,
and also the beasts of the field,

the birds of the
air, and the fish of the sea, whatever passes along the paths of the seas.

O LORD, our
Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!

“I didn't need to understand the
hypostatic unity of the Trinity; I just needed to turn my life over to whoever
came up with redwood trees.”
― Anne Lamott, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith

The question comes early and stays quite
late: who do you think you are?

A few summers ago, I heard the question.
I was sitting in a room with about three thousand smart people. Most of them
run Fortune 500 businesses, or preside over universities, or play in major
symphony orchestras. They made room for me and said, “We will let you sit
here.”

It was a lecture by Margaret Geller, an
astronomer at Harvard. She was describing her life’s work of mapping the
universe. Whenever she has the itch to look at the heavens, she phones up a
governmental observatory in the mountains of Arizona, and they always take her
call. Dr. Geller goes down there, peers through this enormous telescope, and
adds the data to a map she is making of the universe.

She asked the crowd, “Would you like to
see some of what I see?” Without waiting for an answer, she started clicking
through some slides. We saw swirls of light in colors that I have never seen
before. She mentioned distances that my little brain cannot calculate. Billy
Collins, the former poet laureate of the United States, sat in the row ahead of
me. As he looked at the images, he wiped away a tear, stroking his chin, too
dumbstruck to compose a couplet.

A few thousand smart people – and I –
sat humbled. It was impossible to comprehend the size and spaciousness of our
galaxy. That’s when I heard the question in my soul: who do you think you are?

Most of the time, we have a ready
answer. I am William, son of Glenn and Ann, husband of Jamie, father of Katie
and Meg, step-father of Josh and Lauren. Here is my social security number,
here are my GPS coordinates, here are the people I love and live among. Here
are schools where I have studied, here are the products of my labor, here are
the dreams in my soul. But who do you
think you are?

I was telling my youngest kid about my
first day in college. There was no internet to register for courses, so we
stood in a three-hour line. The college freshmen started playing the game of
“Who’s Who.” How big was your high school? Where else could you have gone to
college? How many A.P. credits do you have? I finally asked somebody, “What are
A.P. credits?” Everybody in line stopped talking and turned to look at me.

I mean, I didn’t think I grew up in the
sticks, but it was just then I discovered I had a modest upbringing. I went to a
high school that had two academic tracks – college and work. I was the first
person in my family to go to college right out of high school. I was
registering for courses in the only university that accepted me, one of about
thirty-eight-percent of my high school class who had that opportunity. I was
eighteen years old and thought I was hot stuff; but standing in that
registration line of Long Island high-achievers, the question rose: who do you think you are? I was feeling
pretty small.

The poet who composes Psalm 8 is lying
on his back beneath a star-filled sky. He sees the Milky Way spilling across
the black velvet expanse. Darkness is punctured by a billion points of light.
The moon smiles kindly. The poet exhales awe – and suddenly feels very small.
He says, “When I look at your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and
the stars that you have established” . . . who do I think I am? Who do we think
we are?

The answer is that we are human beings.
We are not mules. We are not angels. We are made to be human beings. That’s our
lot. The dictionary says the Latin origin of the word “human” comes from
“humus,” from the soil. Just like the old story from Genesis: God scooped up
some mud from the river bank, shaped it to resemble the divine image, and blew
holy breath into the nostrils. The first human critter was called “Adam,” a
Hebrew word that means “dirt creature.” That’s who we are. When we get too far
from the soil, life gets out of whack.

There is a parenthesis around all of
this. The poet puts the same line at the beginning and end of the psalm: “O
Lord, our Sovereign, how majestic is your name in all the earth!” God has a
really big name – bigger than “Spirit,” bigger than “Jesus.” Even the name
“Trinity” can only point to the God who is behind everything we see and cannot
see. God says, “I am – I will be – That is my name.” God is Source and
Destination of everything. Everything! If such immensity does not make us feel
small, then we haven’t been paying attention.

Sometimes we recover a sense of God’s
size when we go outdoors. Modern life gives us machines that promise to manage
and reduce the universe, tempting us to presume that we humans are actually in
control. But if you are outside and a storm blows in, the sheer force can stun
you into submission. To quote the cover of this week’s Time magazine: “Sixteen minutes – That’s how much time you have to
save your life. The story of the Oklahoma tornado.” Did you see the pictures of
a whole town flattened? Anybody still want to hang onto the myth that human
beings are in control of anything?

True wisdom begins when we perceive our
complete dependence on God, when we live and breathe and stay flat-footed on
the ground, thanks to a God who thought gravity is a good idea. When John
Calvin, the great theologian, wrote his most famous book, he says, “Our wisdom
consists almost entirely of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.
Without knowledge of God there is no knowledge of self.” The poet of Psalm 8
gave him that insight. You look at the grand glory of the heavens, trust there
is a God behind it, and it pushes you to ask, “Who do you think you are?”

We know the limits of being human – we have
only so many days and time is short. Our bodies can only do so much. We cannot
protect ourselves from the force of tornados, only send in the ambulances and
the bulldozers to handle the wreckage. Illness might strike at any time,
weakness may reduce us. We can never know all that is going to happen
today, much less tomorrow. And all the while, we are prone to the misfire of
thinking too much about ourselves in a universe that does seem to care about us
very much at all.

Anthony
de Mello, in a tale from his recent book One Minute Wisdom, describes
this paradox. "Before I was 20," he says, "I never worried about
what other people thought of me. But after I was 20 I worried endlessly --
about all the impressions I made and how people were evaluating me. Only
sometime after turning 50 did I realize that they hardly ever thought about me
at all."[1] So often we presume
ourselves to be at the center of everyone’s attention, and end up performing
for an audience that isn’t there.

The
astonishing thing is that God should ever take notice. The God who created
quasars and moonbeams is the God who knit together our DNA and says to the
baptized child, “You are mine, all mine.” The Holy One who tosses the comets
across our sky and swirls the wind like cotton candy is the same God who weeps
when the tornado flattens the elementary school after spinning out of control,
the same God who calls on us to care for every broken soul. O Lord, our
Sovereign, who are we that you are mindful of us? Who are we, that You, the
Immortal One, should cares for mere mortals like us.

That
is what gives dignity to each person. God regards us. We are not accidents. We
are not mistakes. Certainly we have bad hair days, get lousy grades in algebra,
and crash our cars into trees. Yet God regards us, setting us a “little lower”
than heaven, giving us responsibility for one another and for all the critters.
Not only that; God has such high regard for human beings that God became a
human being. This is the greatest affirmation of our species.

Who do you think
you are? Child
of God, brother of Jesus, temple of Holy Spirit – that’s what we are. And
perhaps our greatest similarity to our Maker is our imagination. As Frederick
Buechner writes, “Imagining is perhaps as close as humans get to creating
something out of nothing the way God is said to.” He goes on to say:

(Imagination) is a power that to one
degree or another everybody has or can develop, like whistling. Like muscles,
it can be strengthened through practice and exercise. Keep at it until you can
actually hear your grandfather's voice, for instance, or feel the rush of hot
air when you open the four hundred and fifty degree oven.

If you want to know what loving your neighbors is all about, look at them with
more than just your eyes. The bag lady settling down for the night on the hot
air grating. The two children chirping like birds in the sandbox. The bride as
she walks down the aisle on her father's arm. The old man staring into space in
the nursing home TV room. Try to know them for who they are inside their skins.
Hear not just the words they speak but the words they do not speak. Feel what
it's like to be who they are -- chirping like a bird because for the moment you
are a bird, trying not to wobble as you move slowly into the future with all
eyes upon you.

When Jesus said, 'All ye that labor and are heavy laden,' he was seeing the
rich as well as the poor, the lucky as well as the industrious. He was seeing
the bride on her wedding day. He was seeing the old man in front of the TV. He
was seeing all of us. The highest work of the imagination is to have eyes like
that. [2]

Who do you think
you are? I
am what my neighbors are. I am a child of God, brother of Jesus, temple of the
Holy Spirit. And all of us are worthy of the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ,
the love of God, and the friendship of the Holy Spirit.